The FCC admonished New Century Telecom and Zoom-i-Net Communications for failing to comply with commission subpoenas to produce information and documents for slamming and cramming investigations. In two orders (here and here) Tuesday, the Enforcement Bureau also gave the companies 30 days to explain why the FCC should not (1) determine they aren't qualified to hold regulatory authorizations, (2) initiate proceedings to revoke their authorizations, or (3) issue orders declaring their authorizations have terminated. The companies couldn't be reached for comment.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said it will press the U.S. District Court in San Francisco at a Thursday hearing to make public a "massive" drug enforcement database that contains several decades' worth of of telephone metadata. The Drug Enforcement Administration and local drug enforcement officials partnered with AT&T to develop "the Hemisphere Project," with funding from the DEA and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The New York Times revealed the database in a 2013 story, reporting that embedded AT&T employees in drug-fighting units across the U.S. supplied agents and local detectives with Americans' phone data dating back to 1987. EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act request for more information about the program, but said it was given "only a small amount of heavily redacted records in response." At the hearing, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Adam Schwartz plans to argue that the government "must stop misusing public records law to hide information about Hemisphere."

Purchase intent for smart home devices among U.S. broadband households doubled from 21 percent in early 2014 to nearly 50 percent at the end of 2015, a Parks Associates news release said Friday. Safety and security continue to be the main drivers of consumer smart home interest, and once smart home products are in the home, "consumers quickly develop habits with these devices,” Parks Associates President Stuart Sikes said. Usage varies by product, but 40-50 percent of most safety and security device owners control or monitor their systems daily, Sikes said. Age and income are key demographics in the early adopter market, Sikes said. "Mass-market advertising with a clear call-to-action, prompt installation, and service delivery will help speed up the market adoption rate of smart devices." Some 23 percent of U.S. smartphone owners own a smart home device, and more than three-fourths of those consumers use a mobile device at least once a month to control their smart home devices, Parks said.

The Satellite Industry Association urged technological and competitive neutrality in the FCC's planned Connect America Fund reverse auction of broadband-oriented support. SIA "reiterates its support for a CAF framework that does not favor any one technology over others," the group said in a Thursday filing in docket 10-90. "SIA strongly supports the FCC’s longstanding policy of technology neutrality," it said, with a draft CAF Phase II auction order on the tentative agenda for the commission's May 25 meeting (see 1605050036). "Innovations in the satellite industry, including high-throughput satellites, present important potential solutions for the problems that the CAF seeks to address," said SIA, which also backed continued FCC "commitment to the longstanding policy of competitive neutrality." Hughes Network Systems and ViaSat recently made similar arguments (see 1605120029 and 1604150040).

Atlantic Tele-Network cited progress in winning regulatory approvals of its planned buy of subsidiaries of National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corporation (CFC). "ATN and CFC have already received many of the regulatory consents necessary for consummation of the Transaction and are nearing receipt of the others," said an ATN filing posted Wednesday in FCC docket 15-264 that updated commission staff. ATN -- a mobile wireless provider in 10 Western states and the U.S. Virgin Islands and a CLEC in three Northeastern states -- is proposing to buy CFC's DTR Holdings and its telecom and cable TV units operating in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The transaction received "early termination" U.S. antitrust approval Feb. 2 and was cleared by government entities in the British Virgin Islands and St. Maarten, ATN said. The U.S. Virgin Islands Public Services Commission scheduled June 14-16 hearings on the deal and a hearing examiner is to issue a decision July 25, triggering final review by the PSC, ATN said.

ESPN ended its skinny bundle legal fight against Verizon. In joint statements Tuesday (see here and here), the companies said they settled ESPN's 2015 lawsuit about Verizon's offering programming packages that excluded some ESPN channels, allegedly in violation of contractual agreements (see 1504270071), but terms of the settlement won't be disclosed. Terry Denson, Verizon vice president-content strategy and acquisition, said the company "look[s] forward to further collaborating with them to deliver customers content across all of our platforms."

The FCC said it received prohibited written presentations in the Lifeline USF proceeding in which the commission adopted an order overhauling the low-income subsidy program at its March 31 meeting (see 1603310056). The presentations in docket 11-42 were from the American Enterprise Institute, National Association of Counties and six individuals, said a public notice, saying presentations to decision-makers are generally not allowed from the day after release of the meeting's Sunshine agenda until the text of the item is issued (see 1604270028), which in this case was from March 25 until April 27. The presentations "will be associated with, but not made part of the record," said the PN in Tuesday's Daily Digest.

The FCC set the pleading cycle for proposed telecom relay service funding and payment formulas for the program year beginning July 1. Comments on the proposal from TRS administrator Rolka Loube Associates are due May 24 and replies June 3, said a Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau public notice in docket 10-51 listed in Tuesday's Daily Digest. Rolka proposed $1.14 billion in funding and an industry contribution factor of 1.86 percent of carrier interstate and international telecom end user revenues. It proposed per-minute compensation rates of $2.62 for interstate traditional TRS, $3.76 for interstate speech-to-speech relay service and $1.91 for interstate captioned telephone service and interstate and intrastate IP captioned telephone service, all of which are subject to a multistate average rate structure methodology. It also proposed a cut in the $1.37/minute IP relay service compensation rate to $1.21/minute. Rolka didn't make a proposal on video relay service rates because the commission already established a schedule of declining rates, as modified in March, to provide some relief for small, Tier 1 video relay service (VRS) providers with fewer than 500,000 calling minutes per month (see 1603020033 and 1603030065). But it said the weighted average of VRS provider reported projected costs (excluding outreach) of $2.72 per minute remains "well below" the FCC's related compensation rates for the coming year. Providers have disputed FCC cost assessments. The PN sought comment on various other questions and issues related to the TRS program.

The FCC would extend the National Deaf-Blind Equipment Distribution Program another year while it completes a rulemaking to make the program permanent, the commission told us Tuesday, responding to our query about a draft item on its circulation list. The FCC has operated for several years a $10 million pilot program (also called iCanConnect), running from July 1 to June 30, to distribute communications equipment to low-income deaf-blind people under the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. Commenters in the pending rulemaking last year supported the FCC proposal to make the program permanent but diverged on some details (see 1507290063).

The FCC Public Safety Bureau will introduce a new version of the FCC Network Outage Reporting System (NORS) for "testing and, ultimately, operational use,” over the next two months, the FCC said Monday in a public notice. The new version of NORS is to be online as early as Tuesday, the notice said. Part 4 of the FCC’s rules require providers of voice and paging communications providers to report significant disruptions or outages to their communications systems. The FCC is to consider an order on changes to NORS at its May 25 meeting, along with a rulemaking on expanding the requirements to cover broadband providers (see 1605050053). “The new platform contains improvements that will enhance the overall security and reliability of NORS and allow future evolution to best support new communications technologies and analytic methods,” the notice said.